GG has, and always will suffer from the fact that a lot of the people in it were leftists who found themselves cast out, willing to do anything to get back within the loving confines of the herd. Just like a Soviet praising Comrade Stalin as he was led to the wall, or a member of Mao's government clutching his Little Red Book as he's beat to death by the Red Guards, what's happening to them is just a silly little mistake, and if the cool kids knew about it, everything would be cool, right?
The problem with that is all totalitarian governments spend massive amounts of time and effort making sure that their voice is the only one heard, and that everyone knows what the price of dissent and defection is. The average person might realize that they're being lied to and slowly starving to death, but everyone who leaves just disappears.
But I do agree with you in spirit, and I know people who defected from both countries. Hell, I know someone who defected on an embassy trip in Detroit in the 70s, because he realized that Detroit was the shittiest town in the US, and it was as nice as the average Soviet town.
The problem with that is all totalitarian governments spend massive amounts of time and effort making sure that their voice is the only one heard, and that everyone knows what the price of dissent and defection is. The average person might realize that they're being lied to and slowly starving to death, but everyone who leaves just disappears.
This comes to mind:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Even the right-wing people still on half-KiA tend to have a lot of problems though. They think the cultural stuff is far more divorced from politics than it is. For example, they might see something like black Little Mermaid as just being woke virtue signaling instead of seeing it as propaganda in service of physical demographic replacement of actual white people.
GG has, and always will suffer from the fact that a lot of the people in it were leftists who found themselves cast out, willing to do anything to get back within the loving confines of the herd. Just like a Soviet praising Comrade Stalin as he was led to the wall, or a member of Mao's government clutching his Little Red Book as he's beat to death by the Red Guards, what's happening to them is just a silly little mistake, and if the cool kids knew about it, everything would be cool, right?
Anyone with an ounce of cognitive capacity put two and two together and defected once confronted with sufficient information.
The problem with that is all totalitarian governments spend massive amounts of time and effort making sure that their voice is the only one heard, and that everyone knows what the price of dissent and defection is. The average person might realize that they're being lied to and slowly starving to death, but everyone who leaves just disappears.
But I do agree with you in spirit, and I know people who defected from both countries. Hell, I know someone who defected on an embassy trip in Detroit in the 70s, because he realized that Detroit was the shittiest town in the US, and it was as nice as the average Soviet town.
This comes to mind:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Even the right-wing people still on half-KiA tend to have a lot of problems though. They think the cultural stuff is far more divorced from politics than it is. For example, they might see something like black Little Mermaid as just being woke virtue signaling instead of seeing it as propaganda in service of physical demographic replacement of actual white people.